Brian Copeland is one of the top voices on KGO radio, but he also knows his television. When he first developed Not a Genuine Black Man – his riveting one-man show about growing up black in San Leandro in the early 1970s, at a time when the East Bay suburb was notoriously 99.9 percent white and determined to keep it that way – he set out to capture the style of All in the Family, Good Times, Maude and other groundbreaking comedies produced by Norman Lear, where the audience finds themselves laughing hysterically one moment and sobbing the next. “It would be really funny – then you’d find out Edith got raped, and you’d go, ‘Where in the hell did that came from?’” he explains. “Or you’d watch Good Times, there’d be a hilarious line, then all of a sudden J.J. gets shot by a gangbanger. So when I wrote the show, I knew the rhythms I wanted were the rhythms of Norman Lear.”

Copeland nails those rhythms in Genuine, the long-running San Francisco solo show from 2004 that recently debuted in San Jose after successful runs in Los Angeles and off-Broadway. The show runs at the Historic Hoover Theater through Aug. 24. At a time when Barack Obama calls for a national discussion on race in America, Copeland provides that and more in a two-hour roller-coaster ride that explores how our surroundings (and surviving them) make us who we are.

Copeland’s book based on the play, also entitled Not a Genuine Black Man, was recently released in paperback. HBO is developing the play into a television series, while earlier this month Silicon Valley Reads selected the book as its early 2009 pick.

The Wave: Did you always see Genuine as a play?
Brian Copeland: Yes. After 9/11, after hearing how Cantor Fitzgerald lost 90 percent of their company, I started to cry, thinking of how they’d all kissed their kids and wives and husbands and boyfriends and girlfriends and said, “See you tonight” or “This weekend we’re doing this” or “Some day we’re gonna do that.” I started thinking about all the stuff that I would do “some day,” so I sat down and made a list. At the time I was recently divorced and had sole custody of my three kids (they were seventh grade, fifth grade, first grade). I’d been previously doing stand-up comedy on the road while doing my once-a-week radio show. I was touring with Smokey Robinson, Aretha Franklin, all those folks. Suddenly I can’t do that. I’m responsible for three kids. So I decided instead to put my energy into the No. 1 thing on my list: “To do a one-man stage show.”

A few weeks later, Carl Reiner was on my program. I tell him I’m writing this one-man show, but have no idea what to write about. Carl says, “This happens to every performer at some point. It happened to me in 1959, when Sid Caesar’s show got canceled. I’d been with Sid for eight years, and I didn’t know what to do. Then somebody gave me Fred Allen’s autobiography, Treadmill to Oblivion. Fred talks about how the way you write about anything autobiographical is, you find the piece of ground that you alone stand on, and write from there. So I start to think, ‘What’s my piece of ground? Well, I’m a comedy writer, I live in New Rochelle with my wife and kids and I write for a variety show in New York.’ That became The Dick Van Dyke Show.” So Carl says, “You’ve got to find your own unique piece of ground.”

A week or so later, I got this anonymous letter at KGO that said, “As an African-American, I am disgusted every time I hear your voice, because you are not a genuine black man!” I thought, bingo, that’s it. That’s my piece of ground. Because I get this bulls**t from some black people who appoint themselves the arbiter of what it is to be black in America, that I’m not really black. And a lot of white people will say the same thing. I thought, why do people say this? I spent most of my childhood and adolescence as the only black face in the room – as one of the only black faces in the city. So I’d walk my kids to school in the morning, then I’d sit at a café near my house, and I wrote down every story I could remember about growing up in San Leandro. I wrote about stuff that was funny, stuff that was painful, stuff that I’d deliberately forgotten because it hurt so much.

TW: Does one need to be African-American to fully appreciate the play?
BC: No. The show has multiple themes [including race, isolation, depression and housing discrimination]. My audience on average is only 20 percent African-American. The blacks that are attracted to this show are generally suburban African-Americans who have gone through what my family went through – people who have worked hard and saved their money and moved into the suburbs, only to have to deal with all the subtle crap they have to deal with. But I also get people of all races who have gone through different things.

TW: What made you want to be a comic?
BC: I always loved comedy growing up. Then when I was in high school, I saw Richard Pryor: Live in Concert on HBO, and it literally changed my life. I did not know that comedy could be like that. Here’s a guy who’s talking about all of the s**tty things that happened to him the previous year, about being drunk on vodka and shooting the tires off his wife’s car and leaving, about his heart attack and having a dialogue with his heart (“Please don’t kill me”), about snorting cocaine and about how his father behaved at his mother’s funeral. In fact, Genuine is a lot like that concert film in spirit, because it’s very truthful.

TW: Ed Asner recently handed your book to Oprah and said, “You have to read this.” What other cool things have happened because of Genuine?
BC: The two coolest things: I did the show in LA and got a huge write-up in the Sunday Magazine. Monday morning, I get a call from Noel Neill [the actress who originally played Lois Lane on television]. I’d had Noel on my program once or twice. She says, “Brian, there were a bunch of articles in the papers about your show. I cut them all out and I’m mailing them to you.” I thought, “Lois Lane is cutting articles out of the paper about me, and mailing them to me. How cool is that?”

Second coolest thing: I did a two-week run in Malibu last July. One night, Dick Van Dyke, Lou Gossett and Katharine Ross were in the audience. I’m talking to them after the show, and there’s this cute little brunette standing over in the corner. Finally she walks over and I’m thinking, “Where do I know her from?” She said, “I had to laugh, because in the show you talk about Rick Springfield. I don’t know if you ever watched MTV, but my name is Martha Quinn. I was one of the original VJs.”

TW: I loved Martha Quinn.
BC: That’s what I said! I told her, “Are you kidding? I was the first MTV generation.” We talked for about 20 minutes. That was way cool, Martha Quinn. In 1981, there was not a 17- or 18-year-old boy in America that was not in love with that woman.

Not a Genuine Black Man, Thu-Sun thru Aug. 24 (no show Aug. 17), $30-$35, Historic Hoover Theatre, 1635 Park Ave., San Jose. (408) 985-5500 www.briancopeland.com